"Things seem to be spiraling out of control," said Sarah Geraghty, a senior staff attorney for the Southern Center for Human Rights, an Atlanta-based legal advocacy group. "We are seeing mass chaos, essentially, in many of the prisons."
Homicides have spiked in Georgia prisons, which are overcrowded and understaffed, as have reports of violence and abuse, Geraghty said. The Southern Center for Human Rights filed a lawsuit in 2011 against against the state, alleging systematic brutality by guards at another facility, Hays State Prison.
